Simon's Retreat

Simon Levinson (1870–1928) was a socialist activist and Forward correspondent who spent most of 1927 on assignment searching out Jewish communities in upstate New York in order to report back to Forward readers about Jewish life in the boondocks. His articles depicted Jewish “types” and characters as well as communal life in the state’s remote towns and villages. His writing, while seriously confronting the social and cultural issues of the time, was often droll and playful.

After spending a day tracking down and interviewing Jews in Hoosick Falls, NY, Levinson wrote a wryly comic article about what he’d encountered there (Forward, 4/15/1927). Unlike other towns he’d visited, Levinson struggled in Hoosick Falls to locate the Jewish community. When he did finally manage to encounter some characters he satirized them in his signature style. It wasn’t until the final paragraphs of his account, where Levinson describes the sound of the falling water and how it affected him, that I experienced the writer’s emotional response to his day out in the field. The universal thrashing of the waterfall connected him, through nature, to all beings, from time immemorial to the present. Capturing that frame of mind somehow amplified as well as dispelled the loneliness of the traveling correspondent—a perfect formula for a poem, which inspired me to re-fashion the final paragraphs of his piece into a poem, as it so hauntingly conveyed his mood at the end of a hard day's work.

The project of translating Simon Levinson's Forward articles is being commissioned by his great-granddaughter Marilyn Levinson and her sisters.

Myra Mniewski is a poet, writer, Yiddish translator, and teacher. Their work has appeared in Bloom, Bridges, Jewish Currents, In geveb, Forverts and Forward, YIVO online museum, and other venues. They are cofounder of Pollack~Mniewski, Research & Translation, which brings Yiddish to light through translation, multimedia, and performance; a sample of their work can be viewed at jacobmorgenstern.com. Raised to translate for their Yiddish-speaking parents, Mniewski’s relationship to their mother tongue is one of channeling a lost world and, through that, a people whose voices were silenced: "By immersing myself in the voices of my ancestors I’ve been able to meld my love of languages into a vehicle of expression that conveys my own essence and longing."